Have you ever found yourself in any of these situations before?
- You know you need to get out of bed, but you continue to hit the snooze button until you’re left with just enough or not enough time to get ready
- You need to clean out the fridge, but instead, you avoid opening it or look past the stains
- You need to study for a test, but then feel a sudden urge to rearrange the furniture in your living room
- You need to write a blog post or another chapter of your book, but you instead you spend two hours scrolling through social media
If you found yourself shaking your head or saying “Yes” to either of these scenarios, you’re not alone! In fact, I’m guilty of every one of these.
Shifting behavior patterns is no easy task! This is especially true when it comes to dealing with the habits that lead to procrastination. Oftentimes, you may not even know you’re procrastinating.
And sometimes you realize you’re doing it but continue down that path.
Now that we’ve addressed how procrastination shows up in our everyday lives, let’s review a few ways to stop putting things off and halt the effects of procrastination before it gets out of hand.
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1. Make Daily To-Do Lists
Create a list of everything you want to get done for the day. I find it helpful to do this the night before or first thing in the morning. Take careful watch over how many items you put on that list.
Having too much on your list can lead to overwhelm, which often then leads to procrastination. So, do yourself a favor and keep the list reasonable the first few days.
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Once you’ve gained momentum in completing what you need to on a consistent basis, you should then try to challenge yourself to get more things done and off your list.
2. Track Your Progress
Start tracking your activity. You can do this manually on a spreadsheet or on your mobile device with project management software such as Trello or Asana.
Use it as a daily tracker to check off or fill in when you do the thing(s) you committed to yourself to do.
Continue this process daily until it becomes a habit or until the project is done. For larger projects that you may not work on a daily basis, it helps to write down your goal and then break it into milestones.
Record your progress and how much closer to reaching your goals.
3. Find an Accountability Buddy
If there’s something you’ve been struggling to get done, tell someone else about your plans to finally tackle it.
Call a friend, tell your spouse, or announce it on social media. Encourage the people you’re sharing with to check back with you on how you did.
This could be as simple as checking in once in the morning to declare what you want to get done, and then again at the end of the day to see what happened.
It may be the little extra push you need to stop procrastinating.
Give each of these procrastination beating strategies a try and see which ones give you the best results.
As with anything else, procrastination is a habit and you can replace it with new and helpful ones that will support you in increasing your productivity and achieving all the goals you’ve set for yourself.
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